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Local immigrants raised their voices as one


By John Doherty
September 03, 2006
Times Herald-Record
jdoherty@th-record.com
Newburgh - For a few minutes there on March 31, Jose Tobon looked like the loneliest illegal immigrant in America.

He stood outside Newburgh Free Academy, alone, with the principal and two cops waiting nearby. He held a homemade protest banner in his hands, and behind him his classmates crowded the windows to see what he would do.

A little after noon, he screwed up his courage, raised his chin and started walking.

And then an amazing thing happened: People followed.

By the time, Tobon, 18, had reached Downing Park, around the corner from the school, patrol cars were clearing the way at intersections, and at his back a raucous crowd was growing.

Twenty-five, 50, 100 students. When Tobon led them to Broadway, a half-mile away, maybe 200 students marched behind. They had signs of their own — "No to House Bill 4437," "We Are America" — and had begun to holler slogans.

"Latinos stand up!" they shouted over car horns and police sirens.

"Viva La Raza!"

"We're not criminals!"

They got louder and their numbers swelled at every block, and for a couple of hours, the whole city stood still for them.

Soon, though, the marching stopped.

Since then, those at the center of this spring's three local immigrant-rights marches say, local Latinos have wrestled with two legacies.

There is excitement. This area's fragmented Spanish-speaking communities came together so quickly, so dramatically, in the marches.

But there are questions too: How do you build on the excitement?

What comes next?

Tobon's student walk-out was the first of three immigrant-rights rallies held in the spring in Newburgh, each bigger than the last. A month after Tobon's march, an estimated 5,000 Latinos took to the streets in Newburgh, the biggest mass demonstration in the history of this city of 30,000.



At the time, the atmosphere was charged. Nationally, immigration had taken center stage as an issue. And locally, the marches were a noisy coming-out for the mid-Hudson's growing but often invisible Latino community.

For those watching from a distance, the sudden flaring of the immigration issue was like a flash of lightning: It vanished as suddenly as it appeared.

But five months later, those who were at the center of Newburgh's spring protests say the excitement and action of those weeks is still being felt.

It's a mix, they say, of frustration and hope.

"One of the promises we made was that this would not be a one-time thing," said Richard Rivera, 53, president of the Latinos United organization, which helped organize the marches.

"This needed to be the start of something."

For Tobon, now graduated from NFA, the afterglow of his sudden rise to student leader was brief. These days, he works a warehouse job, assembling pallets of napkins, straws, and plates for delivery to local fast-food franchises.

"I have all these ideas. I have been looking for the next thing, the way to take it to the next level," Tobon says. "I can't seem to find a way."

The whole idea of the marches — loud, large-scale, in-your-face demonstrations of Latino unity — seemed custom-built for Leopoldo Moreno.

Moreno, 35, is a street activist through and through. An immigrant himself, he has spent years in Newburgh working low-paying construction, factory and warehouse jobs and making connections: Spanish-speaking store owners, gang members, priests.

During the winter, he scraped some donations together and opened an office for Latinos on Liberty Street.

The agenda and decor matched Moreno's flair for the dramatic and grand: planned protests at businesses that cheated illegal immigrant workers, walls with posters of Pancho Villa and Subcommander Marcos, the ski-masked, pipe-smoking face of the Mexican Zapatista rebel movement.

He called the place Viva La Revolucion — Long Live the Revolution.

"People here are afraid," said Moreno at the time. "They need to learn to stand up for themselves."

In March, when Tobon led the NFA walk-out, Moreno's timing seemed perfect. A tough street guy with politics might suddenly be in demand.

For a while, he was. He began focusing his energy on the young Latinos in the city's Benkard Avenue and William Street area. He opened a computer lab on Mill Street as a place for young people to learn to navigate the Internet.

Mostly, though, Moreno talked to young Latinos about being young Latinos. He talked from experience about the streets. He even encouraged members of the Benkard Bario Kings and Vatos Locos street gangs, whose brawls have included swinging baseball bats and hurling beer bottles, to make a truce.



But the revolution is on hold.

Moreno has had to relocate the office. He's switched phone numbers and had trouble with his new role as leader.

He has plans for a Sept. 16 parade in Newburgh, a sort of sequel to the spring marches. This one would blend independence celebrations for all Latino nations, he says, and could rival the spring protests in size.

But planning has been delayed. Moreno spent a few recent weeks in Orange County Jail on a violation of his 2005 probation for drunken driving.

Richard Rivera's group, Latinos United, is the quintessential umbrella organization. It refers people with problems to other organizations, acts as a liaison between the county government and the Spanish-speaking communities, but direct action like Moreno's keeps the energy of the marches alive.

"It shows people we aren't afraid to stand up for the issues that are important to them, Latinos," said Rivera. "It shows them we're not afraid."

For six years, Latinos United has tried to give political voice to the mid-Hudson's booming, fragmented Spanish-speaking population.

In one month, the three Newburgh marches did more to promote local Latino unity, Moreno says, than a year's worth of Latinos United board meetings.

"We have never had a collaborative event like that, so big," said Rivera. "Ever."

If there are some in the Latino community who wish for a repeat of the dramatic display of the marches, there are others who were moved by it — and moved on.

Alessandra Pereya, 17, was at NFA the day Jose Tobon led his walk-out.

"I didn't go," she says. "I'm sort of a goody-two-shoes."

But, she says, those Latinos who stayed in school were left to explain things to the white and black students.

"A lot of the kids were like, 'Whatever, the Mexicans just walked out,'" she remembers. "I explained, 'Hey, this isn't about Mexicans only. It's about all immigrants.'"

Those conversations have been valuable, says Pereya, an Argentinian.

She says that despite the number of Latino students at NFA, the diversity of the area's Spanish-speaking population is lost on most English-speaking students.

"They're like 'Are you Mexican? No? Oh, are you Puerto Rican?'" she says. "'If you're not Mexican or Puerto Rican, what are you?'"



The excitement of the spring prompted Pereya to attend the later marches and to get involved in other ways.

Every Wednesday, since the marching stopped, the city's Activity Center on Washington Street has become home base for Voz, Conciencia y Accion — Voice, Conscience and Action.

The group gelled around the marches, and its founders include Hondurans, Argentinians and Chileans.

On a recent Wednesday, Pereya joined about 30 others to learn a few steps of Argentinean folk dancing, a few Mexican steps and listened to folk guitar.

When salsa dancing was featured, past Wednesdays have drawn close to 100 people.

"Those of us who have been here for a while, we have to be the voice for those who don't speak English," said Manuael Urquai, a Honduran immigrant who has lived in Newburgh since 1974 and worked at IBM almost as long.

There is talk of unity and community. But there is no talk of protests, lobbying or petitions on these Wednesday nights.

For now, there is dancing, a borrowed community home and, says Urquai, "more closeness."

"You have to understand, a lot of (Latinos) are used to being taken advantage of by people who speak Spanish, too," says Marcela Hoey. "Where they come from, the poverty you just wouldn't believe. And their own people took advantage of them. They come here, and they think we (more established immigrants) think we are smarter than them. There's not a lot of trust."

Hoey, an Argentinian immigrant and mother of two employed at Mount Saint Mary College, became an unlikely leader in the April 10 march, her first political act.

She was among the marchers who handed over a petition to the City Council opposing harsh new proposed federal immigration laws.

And then she spoke to the thousands of Latinos below her from the balcony of City Hall.

Now, she says, people stop her on the street. What do I do about this parking ticket? Will signing up for this aid program or that one get me deported?

VCA hopes more English speakers come to the Wednesday-night sessions and learn about Hispanic culture. In the meantime, they say, it's a chance for Latinos to learn about each other.

The politics can wait.

Here's a small secret about Tobon's march into local history: He had no idea where he was taking people.

Halfway down Broadway, he stopped the students, began to organize some group cheers on the sidewalk. But the kids started to back up. Traffic stopped. The cops looked nervous.



Best to keep things moving, Tobon decided. Down Broadway, past wide-eyed shop owners and honking drivers. Up Liberty Street by Washington's Headquarters and fist-pumping work crews who shouted to him in Spanish. It was dizzying.

For Tobon, it was like a victory lap.

"I get respect now," he says of the reaction of his friends to his leadership that day.

"They know I was like them, and now I'm doing things, other things."

The marches — and his high school graduation — have changed him. He doesn't hang out in the streets. He works all the time.

And slowly, he says, he's begun to think about things differently.

"My parents have been around me all my life," he said. "But this whole thing, it really spoke to me. I never really looked at what they went through. This year, I really learned about their struggles."

Tobon's parents left Puebla, Mexico, when he was 6, and they have carved out a life for him and his three siblings in Newburgh. He is the first person on his dad's side of the family to graduate from high school.

Tobon would like to go to college, but he has no money for it right now. He has no Social Security card, so no hope of student loans.

His warehouse job is similar to the work his father has done, without complaint, for years.

"I never knew cartons of napkins could be so heavy," he joked.

He'd like to encourage adult immigrants in their 30s and 40s to go get their GEDs and learn English. He'd like to be involved in things like that, he says.

He could see himself mentoring young Latinos, around the ages of 10 or 12, before the streets get to them.

He watches the Latino men walk by his house on Broadway after work and is filled with a storm of pride, pity and anger.

"They look so innocent. It makes me mad," he says. "They work so hard. For nothing."

In the spring, Tobon was convinced that the marches would change the world, at least his world.

When asked if he thinks the marches changed the way Latinos in this area think about themselves, he paused.



"I think there's a few people, who changed a few people," says Tobon. "Maybe they can change a few more."



Newburgh's Latino population rising
If it hasn't happened already, Latinos will become Newburgh's biggest racial group - outnumbering both black and white people - sometime in the coming months.

That's the trend revealed by new statistics released this month from the U.S. Census Bureau.

And in Orange County as a whole, where Latinos already outnumber African-Americans, an estimated 14,000 Spanish-speakers have moved here in the past five years. By 2005, the Census Bureau estimates, 14.9 percent of Orange County's 360,000 residents were Hispanic. Of the 2,685 students enrolled at NFA in 2005, 765 were Hispanic/Latino. That's 28.5 percent.

Some census highlights:

• The 2000 census revealed that 36.3 percent of Newburgh's 28,000 residents were Hispanic, and 42.3 percent were white. The census does not break down the 2005 estimates by cities - only counties. But if the growth of the Latino community in Newburgh mirrors the growth in Orange County, Latinos will be the city's largest single racial group by the time the 2010 census rolls around.

• In 2000, 28,710 Orange County residents were foreign-born; by last year, the number had jumped to 36,840.

• In 2005, some 53,671 county residents were Hispanic. In 1990, there were fewer than 30,000. That's up more than 85 percent.

• Although Orange County's Latino population has jumped to 14.9 percent of the total, the county still lags behind the state average. Some 16.2 percent of New York's 18.6 million residents are Latino.